Floating dielectric slab optical interconnection between metal-dielectric interface surface plasmon polariton waveguides

A simple and effective optical interconnection which connects two distanced single metal-dielectric interface surface plasmon waveguides by a floating dielectric slab waveguide (slab bridge) is proposed. Transmission characteristics of the suggested structure are numerically studied using rigorous coupled wave analysis, and design rules based on the study are given. In the wave-guiding part, if the slab bridge can support more than the fundamental mode, then the transmission efficiency of the interconnection shows strong periodic dependency on the length of the bridge, due to the multi-mode interference (MMI) effect. Otherwise, only small fluctuation occurs due to the Fabry-Perot effect. In addition, light beating happens when the slab bridge is relatively short. In the wave-coupling part, on the other hand, gap-assisted transmission occurs at each overlapping region as a consequence of mode hybridization. Periodic dependency on the length of the overlap region also appears due to the MMI effect. According to these results, we propose design principles for achieving both high transmission efficiency and stability with respect to the variation of the interconnection distance, and we show how to obtain the transmission efficiency of 68.3% for the 1mm-long interconnection. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America